Without strength and eroding with dismay, I slid down his body to the floor. “Water wish,” he informed. “From the only remaining creek known to produce it. You know it well, my daring, darling wife, being that you grew up in the forest mere miles from it.”

A tasteless potion to render someone temporarily without abilities. The algae that provided the liquid was made illegal and destroyed many centuries ago after being abused for too long.

The wine. He’d drugged the wine.

Rorn stepped over me and strode to the doors. “Its effects will wear off in roughly a week’s time, and by then…” He released an exhale, his tone hardening. “You will find there’s no longer any point in endangering yourself.”

The doors closed.

Hours turned into two days. Meals were delivered to my parlor by my husband only.

After countless failed attempts at pleading with him to let me go, and to find me the remedy to end this cruel punishment, I was left with no choice but to surrender.

I paced, and I cried. I ignored him.

I loathed him.

The unjustness of all he’d done, of all I’d endured out of responsibility and some foretold love…

It multiplied into a hatred so deep, my skin hummed with the burn that slowly reverberated from my chest. From a place deep within the soul.

It gathered and grew until I couldn’t sit still without clawing at my skin.

I didn’t sleep. I paced, and I painted.

Not even Theenon was permitted to visit me. I was alone, but not like before. Now, I was alone and aching and burning alive while wrapped within the cold embrace of my king’s so-called devotion.

And so I let it break loose. All of it. Everything I’d suppressed and ignored and fought against for months and months on end to no avail.

Shaking all over, I found one of many paintings of a green eyed wolf.

One of the many I’d had to leave unfinished for I’d given him up, believing I’d had to, believing he wouldn’t want me. That even if he still did, it would never work. That leaving him was for the best.

It no longer mattered if he didn’t want me. It only mattered that he lived. So I set the painting upon the easel and wiped the wet from my face, and then I succumbed to the agony of completing it.

If I couldn’t reach him, if this war that had moved to Vordane took him, then I would at least see him. I refused to forget him, no matter what it did to me. Attempting to had never worked anyway.